86
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 27, 2013
THE CURRENT CINEMA
COUPLES
"Before Midnight" and "What Maisie Knew."
BY DAVID DENBY
Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in the third film of Richard Linklater's trilogy.
When we last saw Celine and Jesse,
at the end of "Before Sunset"
(2004)---the second film in Richard
Linklater's trilogy about a French-Amer-
ican romantic alliance---they were in Ce-
line's Paris apartment, and Celine ( Julie
Delpy) was softly swaying to Nina Sim-
one, while Jesse (Ethan Hawke) watched
her, enchanted, and missed his flight
home to his wife and child in New York.
That final scene delivered a promise that
the two would be a couple at last, a prom-
ise that has been fulfilled, for better and
for worse, in the third film in the trilogy,
"Before Midnight." It's been a long jour-
ney. The on-again, off-again relationship
began in 1995, with the first film, "Before
Sunrise," when the characters were in
their early twenties. In that movie, Jesse,
a footloose American, meets Celine, a
student at the Sorbonne, on a train, and
persuades her to get off with him in Vi-
enna. They spend the rest of the day and
the night walking through the city, meet-
ing eccentric people and nestling in a
park. But mostly they talk---about their
parents, their hopes, their relationships,
each other. Some of the conversation is
borderline pretentious ("I'm sick of my-
self. Being with you, it's made me feel like
I'm somebody else"). But all of it sounds
like what smart, privileged young people,
flirting in a foreign country, might say to
one another as they turned themselves in-
side out, dying to make an impression.
Linklater, writing the script with Kim
Krizan, understood that modern mating
rituals depend on put-ons, games, boasts,
self-deprecation, egotism dissolving into
laughter.
The first film ends with Jesse and Ce-
line parting at a Vienna train station.
They want the relationship to stay easy,
so they don't exchange telephone num-
bers; instead, they agree to meet again in
Vienna exactly six months later. But the
meeting never comes off, and nine years
go by. In "Before Sunset," they encoun-
ter each other in Paris, and begin wear-
ing out shoe leather again, walking
through the Latin Quarter and other
tourist spots (the movies have their trav-
elogue appeal) as they take turns charm-
ing and teasing each other. They are
both unhappy. Julie is an environmental
activist who has lost too many battles;
she has also never forgotten Vienna. In
America, Jesse has become a successful
novelist, but he's stuck in a marriage to a
woman he doesn't love. He has Viennese
memories, too.
Except for the sit-down philosophical
confab "My Dinner with Andre," I can't
think of another American film so heav-
ily committed to confessions, anecdotes,
and longing. Woody Allen, repeating
Godard's audacity in "Breathless," cre-
ated walking-and-talking sequences in
"Annie Hall" and "Manhattan," but not
with the kind of sustained takes that Link-
later pulls off, some of which go on for
five or six minutes, the camera steadily
receding before the actors as they stroll
through city streets and gardens. From
the beginning, Linklater banned impro-
visation. Everything is scripted, but the
conversation turns odd corners, and oc-
casionally runs into dead ends, before
starting up again. For me, the clarity and
the force of scripted exchange are much
more satisfying than the hesitations and
the plunges of improvisation, which so
often falls into dithering. Of course,
without the right actors, none of the
films would have worked. Delpy, with
her Botticelli-blonde locks and her ba-
byish smile, is seductive one minute,
brilliantly articulate and tough the next.
Ethan Hawke has his downtown-artist,
lean-and-hungry look, and a capacity for
male silliness that suddenly gives way to
acute insights into everyone and every-
thing. The two of them are dexterous
enough to keep the ball in play. They
may be maddening at times, but they've
never been dull.
"Before Midnight" picks them up
after another gap of nine years. Jesse has
indeed left his wife; he and Celine are
now together, vacationing with their two
little daughters among the olive groves of
Messenia, in southern Greece. The tril-
ogy has turned into a kind of cinematic
novel, comparable in fictional terms to
what Michael Apted has been doing in
his "7 Up" documentary series and to the
Nicholas Nixon book "The Brown Sis-
ters," which features photographs that
Nixon took of four sisters each year for
thirty-three years. These life-journey
projects are both heartbreaking as a rec-
ord of the progression toward death and
liberating as a record of how men and
women assert their identity more strongly
as they age. We now experience Jesse and
Celine as familiars, as fascinating and
infuriating friends. They have lost their
ILLUSTRATION BY JORGE GONZALEZ